Last week, Thursday the 26th of September, 2019, I attended the Dutch Belgium User Group meetup (SUGBELUX), where Sitecore’s Tom de Ridder (CTO & Co-founder of Stylelabs, now part of Sitecore) and Sitecore’s Frederic Fosselle (head of Sitecore Content Hub product development) gave a deep dive on the Sitecore Content Hub.
I was really under the impression that the Sitecore Content Hub was just another Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, but it’s so much more than that. After seeing a blog-post by Chris Williams on The Copernicus Moment and Sitecore Content Hub, he states that Sitecore Content Hub will be a huge game changer for Marketers and will be in the center of all their activities. It could be a shift, it could not be. But I was impressed. In this blog I’m going to walk you through what was presented there.
Solving the content crisis
Tom de Ridder started off demo-ing how Sitecore is solving the content crisis. The intention of the Sitecore Digital Experience Platform is to show relevant content to ultimately drive conversation, where 3 pillars are important:
- Channels – where you would like to deliver experiences
- Data – classify customers into segments
- Content – Create and server different content for each targeted segment
In a lot of enterprise companies there’s a siloed content creation, where often different people create content to be used for their CMS, their Commerce channels, Social, CRM, Apps & Retail channels. One unified Content Hub would solve the problem if inconsistent content is shown to unique visitors on different channels.
What’s in the box?
The Sitecore Content Hub is a complete SaaS solution, to do 360 degree Marketing Content Management. It includes several modules such as a PIM module, Content module, Project module and has Print & DRM capabilities/modules. Sitecore Content Hub allows the content creators to give feedback on content, steamline processes through workflow, planning and strategy and facilitates collaboration.
The minor version of Sitecore Content Hub includes Product Content Management & Digital Asset Management functionality, where the Enterprise version includes everything. Customers can go to Sitecore sales to buy specific modules, so the whole product can be really adapted to the needs of the customer. Customers can define custom schema’s suited for their business. Sitecore Content Hub has integrated several Azure functionalities such as Azure Computer Vision (for automatic content tagging), Azure CDN (for public links of assets – did you know that for example renditions for certain channels like Facebook header, Twitter etc… is baked in? 😉). There’s faceted search, so the end user can quickly get to specific products and content in the Sitecore Content Hub and people can collaborate together by making annotations to images to better work together. So it’s realy important to say that Sitecore Content Hub is way more than just a DAM, it’s a huge collaboration tool for content creation (it even includes Jobs, which you can compare to a tool like JIRA).
Technical insight into Sitecore Content Hub
After Tom was finished it was time for Frederic Fosselle, Product Development lead of the Sitecore Content Hub, to give us an insight into the technical architecture of the Content Hub. It’s build on cloud-first architecture that allows for generic content modelling and serves a Hypermedia HATEOAS REST API. Every UI possibility is also available through the REST Api. The Sitecore Content Hub offers a Cloud Development Framework toolkit and has a lot of integration hooks such as Triggers and offers a scripting framework, that can be used to execute actions. It’s highly extensible and customisable.
The last part was very technical, and to be able to start developing against the Sitecore Content Hub & extending it, you probably really need a Develop for the Sitecore Content Hub training.
All in all, the product was way more than I expected.
Want to read more?
If you want to read and learn more on the Sitecore Content Hub make sure you do the following:
- Visit the Sitecore Content Hub landingpage
- Watch the video on Setting up the Sitecore Plugin for Stylelabs DAM
- Watch the video on Sitecore Content Hub Demo
- Read the slides of ‘Unlock Your Personalization Potential with Content’
- Sitecore Content Hub documentation portal
If you want to learn even more on Sitecore’s Content Hub, then come to the session ‘Using Sitecore Content Hub to take control of your digital asset lifecycle’ at Sitecore Symposium 2019 in Orlando (Thursday November 7th) where Chris Williams is going to present together with Tim Pashuysen (Sitecore)
Happy Sitecore-ing!
Robbert
